What's in a Label?

In an earlier post I alluded to some issues in describing sound recordings. When you've got one hundred thousand recordings, as the Hoover Archives does, this is a big issue. The obvious answer is to use the label information, but that assumes that each recording is labeled, that the label is accurate and complete, and that we can interpret it. The photos here, taken from audio items in our holdings, show how difficult this can be. What do we do when we cannot read the language (or the handwriting), don't know which number to use, don't have a key to the meaning of the numbers, or have detailed recording notes without a title to give context to the notes?

We're approaching the description challenge from various directions. Sometimes the labels do provide useful information, which we're adding to our collection guides. For instance, Milton Friedman's Economics Cassette series, distributed by subscription and totaling 215 tapes, has labels indicating topics and date; we recently added all the label data to the guide to the Friedman papers.

For the thousands of sound recordings in the Commonwealth Club records, we are working from printed summaries to populate an extensive database of recordings with program titles, speaker names, Library of Congress subject headings, and descriptive summaries. Metadata cataloging interns from a local library school continue to contribute to this massive effort.

In our audio preservation lab, we digitize recordings one by one, which involves playing each at its listening speed ("real time"). When the recordings are in English, the audio engineer writes notes about their content, which is then added to the collection guide, such as we did with the lacquer discs in the Christopher T. Emmett Jr. papers (Emmett was an officer and organizer of anti-Nazi and anticommunist organizations in the United States). We publicized the completion of this project, and many similar digitization and description projects, on the Hoover Library and Archives web page.

We also ask visiting researchers to help. When one had listened to a number of tapes from box 1330 of the records of the American Council on Education, we asked her to make notes about speaker names and program titles, which we then added to the collection guide. (We're always looking for new ways to overcome labeling deficiencies and provide more descriptions of our sound recordings.)

A few labels from the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcast records and the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service miscellaneous records, Hoover Institution Archives.

Culture Shock

In organizing and describing materials in archives such as ours, with collections from all over the globe, the exotic can sometimes seem routine. One gets used to working with documents in any number of languages and photographs that depict unusual scenes in distant places. Sometimes, however, one experiences what might be called the shock of the familiar: something one recognizes but in a radically different context.

I had such a sensation recently while working on the Wayne Holder papers, which largely deal with Estonia, especially during the period when Estonians were struggling for renewed independence (from the late 1980s until it was achieved
in 1991). Knowing the history of the Baltic states, I found the photographs of the Estonian independence movement in the Holder collection extremely interesting but not startling. I already had a frame of reference with which to interpret them; they resembled other photographs depicting similar events occurring in Latvia and Lithuania at the same time, as all three Baltic countries sought to escape the Soviet Union and to become sovereign nations again.

What did astonish me were the photographs below of young people in Tallinn, Estonia, in the late 1980s. Members of a subculture defining itself through punk music, they looked as though they had stepped off the streets of London or San
Francisco in the late 1970s. But the unusual clothes and hairstyles were a good deal more than a fashion statement; even in the late Soviet period, those who dressed this way in Estonia were taking rather more risks than their Western counterparts. In the 1960s, hippies in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe had been subject to persecution by the state, and one can imagine that punks would have also encountered hostility from the authorities.

The role of Western countercultural trends in undermining the orthodoxy of Soviet society was significant. I have talked to people in Latvia who spoke rapturously of the first time they heard the music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan and how such music had played a role in the emergence of a youth culture in Eastern Europe seeking to be free of the party line imposed by the communist state. I wondered if the punk movement, admittedly a much smaller phenomenon than the ’60s counterculture, had played a part in the changing attitudes in Estonia in the 1980s.

In the album where I discovered these photographs, the young woman with the cap is identified as Merle (“Merca”) Jääger, about whom there were other materials in the Holder papers. In the 1980s, as a poet associated with the punk scene in Estonia, she had been invited to perform her poetry before Estonian émigré audiences in Toronto and New York. Wayne Holder had published some of her poems in English in a short-lived literary journal (Cake) in San Francisco in 1988. Additional material established a connection between the Estonian punk movement and protests against the Soviet system, themes present in Jääger’s poetry.

Jääger was one of a number of Estonian literary figures that Holder met and corresponded with in Estonia. Many were far more conventional than she was, but all were in some way involved in the cultural and political awakening in Estonia in
the 1980s. My experience with the photographs has given me a greater appreciation for Holder himself and for the extent of his contacts in a place he visited as an outsider during a time of great change.

Wayne Holder papers, Box 8, Hoover Institution Archives.
This work is protected by privacy and copyright laws and is provided for educational and research purposes only. Any infringing use may be subject to disciplinary action and/or civil or criminal liability as provided by law. If you object to Hoover's use of this image, please contact archives@hoover.stanford.edu.

Wayne Holder papers, Box 8, Hoover Institution Archives.
This work is protected by privacy and copyright laws and is provided for educational and research purposes only. Any infringing use may be subject to disciplinary action and/or civil or criminal liability as provided by law. If you object to Hoover's use of this image, please contact archives@hoover.stanford.edu.

Wayne Holder papers, Box 8, Hoover Institution Archives.
This work is protected by privacy and copyright laws and is provided for educational and research purposes only. Any infringing use may be subject to disciplinary action and/or civil or criminal liability as provided by law. If you object to Hoover's use of this image, please contact archives@hoover.stanford.edu.

How Does a Pie Thrown in the Face Sound?

Is it a thwack or more of a splat? You can decide for yourself if you come to the Hoover Archives and listen to the sound recording of Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling speaking at the Commonwealth Club on June 21, 2001, or listen to it on the club's website. The sound of a protester throwing a pie at Skilling, and the mild chaos that followed, is audible in the first few minutes of the recording.

I think about why sound recordings--and other audiovisual (AV) materials--are important for historical research; this recording gets at part of the answer. The club's transcript of the event does not mention the pie. Even if it did, does reading about it carry the same impact as hearing it happen? I don't think so. There's a visceral, emotional charge connected to sound and video that adds complex dimensions missing from the written word.

This is why, Martin and Annelise Anderson, the authors of Reagan, in His Own Hand, which focuses on Ronald Reagan's writings, also produced Reagan, in His Own Voice, an audiobook of his radio addresses. Listening to Reagan reveals aspects missed when simply reading his words on the page. Recordings bring personalities alive, adding nuanced layers to political messages and persuasive art.

The Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory in the Psychology Department at San Francisco State University specializes in analyzing the emotional content of videos. One of its projects involves analyzing videos of speeches given by leaders of nation- states or ideologically motivated groups that are at odds with other nations or groups that eventually engage in either acts of aggression or nonviolent resistance. Leaders such as Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, George W. Bush, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama are on its list.

Many researchers, however, are reluctant to use AV materials, thinking it takes too much time to listen to or watch a recording. They also find it difficult to determine whether a recording will be useful, whereas they can quickly survey textual documents to evaluate their content. Nor were they trained to use AV materials in their graduate programs. When I ask professors about this, they usually acknowledge their own avoidance of AV materials. They do, however, see their successors coming up the ranks; this new cohort, they tell me, is media- savvy and comfortable analyzing AV materials as historical evidence. For them, we've got a good hundred thousand sound recordings and thousands of videos.

Reagan In His Own Voice, available through Amazon.com and in the Hoover Archives.